September 27, 2017
New #LaBreaWebs website!
We’ve got a new website up that aggregates the info on our La Brea food webs project! Check it out! https://labreawebs.wordpress.com/
February 28, 2017
March Mammal Madness is here!
It’s my favorite time of year! March Mammal Madness! #2017MMM is a scientifically-accurate, completely geeky competition between mammals, developed by Katie Hinde and colleagues. Check out the #2017MMM website for more info. And if you’re at UC Merced, I’m organizing a local version of the competition. To compete officially in the local version of the competition,…
August 1, 2016
#IceBucketChallenge
The Blois lab has been having fun scouting for new field sites in Sequoia National Park this summer. A post on that work will be coming up soon. But in the midst of all the field work, we took a moment to honor our colleague and mentor Dr. Marilyn Fogel, currently the chair of the Life…
December 16, 2015
Are community assembly rules different today than in the past?
I’ve got a new paper out today, in Nature*! Working with a large group of researchers as part of the Smithsonian ETE Community Assembly and Disassembly Through Time working group, we pulled together fossil and modern datasets spanning plants and animals, from many hundreds of millions of years ago, to thousands of years ago, to…
October 23, 2015
Website updates!
After almost three years at UC Merced, with two postdocs, four graduate students, and many undergraduate students doing exciting work in the lab, our research descriptions were a bit outdated. A major fall project for me and the lab has been to update the descriptions of what we do, and it’s finally (mostly) done! This…
October 20, 2015
Congratulations, Kaitlin!
Kaitlin Maguire will be leaving the Blois lab at the end of this week! Kaitlin got a job as an Ecologist and Statistician for the USGS in Boise, Idaho. She will be joining the Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center and primarily working on a project modeling the effects of fire and other ecosystem disturbances on communities….
August 28, 2015
Welcome, fall semester!
The fall semester started up this week at UC Merced. It’s an exciting time on campus and in the lab- new classes, new undergrads, and new grad students! In particular, the Paleoecology Lab is very excited to welcome two new students to UC Merced! Robert Boria is starting his PhD in the Quantitative and Systems Biology Graduate…
March 11, 2015
#2015MMM: Additional entries
And here are the entries for Danaan and Eric. We’ve got a good mix of final predicted winners in the lab. Jessica, Sarah, and Kaitlin all predict Amphicyonidae to win (hmmm…coincidence that the most senior folks have the same final prediction? I think not- surely it’s the wisdom of age), Eric predicts the Rougarou, Danaan the…
March 10, 2015
#2015MMM
The Blois lab is gearing up for the 2015 edition of Mammal March Madness! We are so excited about this years competition. Last year, we participated as a lab group. This year, we’re ramping up the intra-lab competition and each filling out our own brackets. Entries so far are pretty consistent: Jessica, Kaitlin, and Sarah…
March 5, 2015
Vernal Pools: scouting for research sites!
This Presidents’ day, the Blois lab decided to put the day off school to good use—to get a jump on some research! We will soon be starting a project sampling small mammals at the Vernal Pools reserve, located right behind UCM. This project will have two purposes: to give the reserve managers an idea of…